Less Is More

I will never forget how JoeSki was interviewed[1] after winning the
Forgetacular contest in which he was asked if he had anything to share
with other forgers, to which he said, Less Is More for video
performance and because you shouldn’t over forge just because you can.
Chris Carney also used that quote when discussing[2] how he went about
forging The Cage to point out that simple maps are easier for
players to grasp. And when I submitted Hekau to the Ricochet Forge
Contest, the one thought that was running through my mind all night long
was, Less Really Is More.

I say this because one of the greatest achievements of Hekau was that
it was the only map of the six finalists that suffered next to no frame
drops in 2LP split screen mode. All the others had moderate to severe
frame drops all the time and from most or all positions on
those maps. But Hekau had only slight frame drops and only from the top
of the spine looking down the center of the spine by both players.

To achieve this important performance edge over its competition,
Hekau had a head start – the Canvas was the natural flooring for nearly
every part of the map, where as the other five had floors made
exclusively of blocks or mostly made of blocks. Impact’s second rock’s
bowl offered a natural gentle and somewhat uneven gradient of incline
through out. As I shared in an earlier lesson, leveraging the terrain’s
gentle slopes is a powerful way to make your map more interesting and
fun to play on. And it also helps in controlling video performance for
split screen as well.

It was when I began to test 2LP and discovered significant frame
drops that I began to literally rework the main wall and reduce the
height of the central tower (the weenie). The wall was originally
constructed out of 2×2 flats with large ramps on either side. These
blocks merged together became problematic and had to be replaced some
how with less blocks that looked just as good. I tried 2×2 talls with
railings and it sort of looked good, but it was still too much. I tried
3×3 talls, which meant that each of the teams’ bases had to move since
the number of blocks, and thus their final angle off center, would be
different. But in the end, that worked best for rendering performance
and it gave 50% wider top. The only thing I lost in the process was the
small edge that the black trim of the large ramps played in the original
architecture. But I realized that the wider top of the wall gave it
more of a Star Wars-esque feel and I never looked back. The frame rate
was improved drastically by reducing the number of blocks through out.

This is an important lesson when forging for the playlists, because
in general the publisher doesn’t want to limit a customer’s ability to
play with their friends on their only xbox. If you are seriously
targeting the playlist, then you seriously need to get video rendering
performance under control.[3]

Going back to something I said at the start of this blog, my goal is
to learn and improve my skills as a forger, and I use the playlists as
my target, the framework to forge my map for. And split screen is part
of that framework. When I find that my map performs at 3fp in split
screen mode, I scrap it and start over. People who are serious about
forging for the playlist need to forge for split screen because split
screen is part of the playlists.